


to unpath'd waters, undream'd shores

by Casylum



Category: The Addams Family (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:46:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28144815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: Wednesday Addams, 0001 Cemetery Lane, starts receiving mail for Wendy Adams, 1001 Cemetery Ridge, the summer before she goes away to college.
Comments: 35
Kudos: 164
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	to unpath'd waters, undream'd shores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ppyajunebug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ppyajunebug/gifts).



> > A cause more promising  
>  Than a wild dedication of yourselves  
>  To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores, most certain  
>  To miseries enough; no hope to help you
> 
> — William Shakespeare, _A Winter's Tale_ , Act IV, scene iv 

Wednesday Addams, 0001 Cemetery Lane, starts receiving mail for Wendy Adams, 1001 Cemetery Ridge, the summer before she goes away to college. Pugsley's already there—college, that is—but Wednesday had taken a gap year to help out Grandma Frump and finish her dark arts and darker applications correspondence course.

Initially, she just leaves Wendy's mail in an ever growing heap on the porch, each day's worth tied together with bits of leftover twine or chain-link. The post-person will pick it up, she reasons, until Mother reminds her that Chester MacChesterton, their usual post-person, is on vacation, and the replacement hasn't got past the screaming, crying, and throwing stage when confronted with the gate.

After that, Wednesday is resolved. Mail is a bright, absurdly mismanaged system of often meaningless communication, and Wendy Adams deserves her ever increasing stack of flyers, credit card offers, and catalogs. 

She asks Thing to drive over to the Ridge and give Wendy her mail, the gathered piles of which are now living in an empty slat-sided crate labelled "DYNAMITE - 15LBS". Father has the hearse—modified so that gas, brakes, and steering can be operated with one hand—so all that's left in the driveway is the Oldsmobile, a manually-operated iron boat of a vehicle that Cousin Itt had dropped it off before driving away in a gleaming Tesla. 

Lurch—since he's free, has feet and needed to run errands anyway—goes with him, and they soon return with new hedge-clippers for mother and a packet of spider screams and lapsang souchong for Grandma. For Wednesday they have a smaller stack of misplaced mail, a plate of sour-cream cookies carefully frosted in bright shades of purple and green, and an invitation.

She passes the plate around, ignoring her own backlog of mail in favor of the invitation. "CAMP CRISTAL LAKE," it reads across the top in bold, red letters, a very insistent asterisk afterwards assuring the reader, "NO, NOT THAT ONE." What follows is a relatively bland description of summer camp, one with boating, hiking, swimming, arts, crafts, and far too many bugs, all of which Wednesday would usually ignore except for the last bit of printed text and the handwritten note scrawled underneath it.

"CAMP COUNSELORS WANTED," it reads in the same lurid red, "PAYMENT OFFERED. NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED." The note itself is in black, ink smudged in places: "PLEASE COME. YOUR MAIL SEEMS INTERESTING, YOUR BUTLER IS NICE, AND YOUR RIGHT-HAND SAYS YOU'RE BORED. CHANCE OF DISASTER APPROXIMATELY 100%. IT WILL BE FUN. — WA"

Wednesday looks up just in time to see Lurch bite into a cookie, hitting one of the hard sugar dragées that sprinkle the top and cracking a tooth from edge to gum.

"Should I?" she asks, showing Grandma the invitation.

Grandma looks at it, munching on her own cookie with much greater care than Lurch, and nods. "It'll be good for you," she says, mouth full of crumbs, "and besides, I need more dragon ichor. You can ask Chrysanthemum for some while you're there."

Wednesday blinks. "Chrysanthemum?"

"The lake monster, dear," Mother says, slowly shredding rose petals into a small cauldron. "Every good lake has one. Your father and I tried to get one of Chrissie's little ones to move into the lake behind the house, but they'd already agreed to move to a much larger place upstate, so we hired Claudine and put in the hedge maze instead."

"Forsythia," Lurch lisps around the fingers holding his tooth together as Thing carefully paints it over with super glue, "Wonderful plant. Would have been a great fit."

"Mmm," Mother agrees, and Wednesday sets about the task of finding a sheet of paper that won't set off the cavalcade of alarm bells their post office installed after Pugsley tried to mail himself a bomb.

~~~

Wednesday accepts the invitation a few days later in the only way Mother will allow: in person, accompanied by Thing, Wendy’s cookie plate, and a carefully curated bunch of rose stems, tied with a thick strip of burlap. When she questions this, Mother just raises an eyebrow, the light shifting to highlight the line of her cheekbones. 

“Debbie?” she reminds her. “I trust you’re a bit more...discerning than your uncle, but it’s always best to make sure before you commit yourself to a month in the woods.”

Father’s home when she leaves for the Ridge, working on the greenhouse for Mother, which means the hearse is available for Thing to drive Wednesday over. She could drive herself, since she actually has her license (unlike Pugsley, who simply has a laminated sheet of folded printer paper that says “I CAN DRIVE”), but Thing offers and she’s better at map reading anyhow.

The house on the Ridge, when they pull up to it, is a single-story red-brick ranch with sky-blue shutters, black shingles, and a wide, ground-level porch hugging the front of it. Thing parks on the street, and indicates that he’ll wait in the car by turning up the midday replay of old Car Talk episodes on the local NPR station. 

Wednesday gathers Mother’s bouquet and Wendy’s plate and walks up the drive to the house. taking note of the SUV painted a cheery blood-red parked on the right side of the open garage as she does so. The door, when she reaches it, has a taped-over doorbell with “NO” written directly onto the tape in blurring ink, and a wrought iron knocker shaped like a bear trap bolted into the center. 

“PULL DOWN HARD” is engraved into what would be the trigger if the trap were real. Wednesday shifts the plate into her other hand and pulls.

The center ratchets out at an angle with a deafening rattle, and the jaws of the trap snap shut with a crash that seems to send a whole host of other objects to shaking in the house beyond. A muffled yowl echoes at around foot level, and Wednesday looks down to see a marmalade cat framed in the thin window lining the door, back arched and fangs bared.

“Sorry,” she says, wincing respectfully. Mother would never forgive her for offending one of the local cats. The marmalade hisses one more time before turning and fading from view, tail swishing pointedly.

The door opens about thirty seconds later, swinging into the house with nothing but a light clank to mark its passing. In the foyer, lit with the yellow light from the chain chandelier overhead and the paler light of the outside sun is what can only be Wendy Adams, a fact that’s confirmed when she rolls forward and introduces herself, hand outstretched to shake.

Wendy is about Wednesday’s age, dressed in lounge pants printed over with brambles and a sweatshirt advertising a local campground that’s seen better days. Her hair is wrapped up tall in a brightly colored satin scarf with blocky geometric patterns, and her brown eyes gleam brightly from behind large, wire-rimmed glasses.

“Hi,” she says as they shake hands. “You must be Wednesday. No one else has one of my cookie plates right now. I’m Wendy, Wendy Adams. I got your mail.”

“Yeah,” Wednesday says stiffly. “I’m Wednesday. Um...your door..?”

“Oh, did you like that?” Wendy beams as Wednesday nods. “I made it myself. The doorbell kept shorting, and I never heard it anyway. Resetting the door is a bit of a pain, but worth it.”

“My mother would adore it,” Wednesday says, quite seriously. “Has anyone ever got their hand stuck?”

Wendy laughs, an irregular honk of mirth that rolls her back and forth slightly. “Oh, absolutely,” she says, still laughing as she turns and waves for Wednesday to follow her. “We get all kinds, you know, kids doing pledges, scouts selling popcorn, whatever. They all think it’s great.” She wheels her way into a bright kitchen, and directs Wednesday over to a low table tucked inside a nook. 

“The parents, though,” she continues, “the parents always seem to have a problem, and there was one mom who felt it was necessary to come over and tell me how terribly deadly my door was, and how dare I put her child in danger. To which I replied that no-one asked her child to come and knock on my door, and that the post-person had no problems with it besides, so I really wasn’t all that concerned if she felt she hadn’t taught her child how to safely navigate the world.”

“So,” Wendy says, spinning almost in place to take her place at the table, “you want to work at the camp?”

Wednesday blinks. “I...yes. Yes, I would, I think. My mother thinks it will be good for me, and she speaks highly of the campgrounds.”

“We’re a pretty loose bunch,” Wendy explains. “There’ll be eight of us, plus you and me, if you sign on, and seventy kids from ten to sixteen. Two of us, Marlon and Marlene, are cooks when they’re not child wrangling, and sleep in the mess. The rest of us get one of the cabins by lottery, and the campers are ten to a bunk by the same. Housing is co-ed, unless they’ve got specific, pre-arranged reasons why it shouldn’t be, and then they bunk with me. Set-up and break-down is done by counselors. Still interested?”

“Absolutely,” Wednesday replies, and smiles just as something sets off the screeching bang of the door-trap again.

~~~

For the campers, the grounds of Camp Cristal Lake open two weeks from the day Wednesday received her invitation-slash-job offer, enticing them in with all the things the flyer promised and some of the things that Wendy mentioned in-person. For the counselors, it's one week, with their only encouragement being the thought of Wendy’s smiling face and eventually getting money in return for enduring a month's worth of dodgy plumbing, worse food, and children below the age of fifteen.

The drive to Camp Cristal Lake is serene, broken only by the snapping hum of a power plant and the long, mournful whistle of a freight train. Wednesday waits for it to pass at an otherwise empty crossroads, and relives her childhood plans of becoming a rider of the rails, a dream that had only been shattered by Father revealing that trains, more often than not, tended not to actually run into each other.

The turn-off for the camp leads her on a long drive down a private road that public works crews took the initiative to forget years previously. The Oldsmobile, in the stubborn way of old cars young people are forced to drive, makes it through the maze of potholes and root-humps, finally spitting her out on the shores of Cristal Lake. She has just enough time to appreciate the view before a large sign reading, "TURN LEFT. NOW." looms into view.

"Left?" she wonders aloud, before jerking the wheel hard in the same direction, just in time to avoid launching the Olds over a steep embankment into the water below. A glance in the rearview mirror shows that others had, perhaps, been less careful: a brightly colored buoy is tied to the crumbling fender of a car that just barely breaks the surface, another sign taped to it that reads, "GRAVEYARD OF LAND SHIPS", with a child's drawing of a car underneath. 

She can’t help but note that never, not once in their initial conversation or the follow-up check-ins after, had Wendy mentioned the turn. It will be good for you, Mother had said, right as always.

The camp, when she reaches it, seems to be a loose collection of buildings scattered around a wide, unkempt field of tall grass and scrub brush, with beaten down paths wending their way from one place to the other. There’s a cracked and weedy patch of concrete and gravel on the other side of the camp from the lake that already has a Honda Civic of indeterminate age perching on the far edge, in addition to Wendy’s SUV, and Wednesday parks the Olds a little in front of it, almost starting the first arc of a circle. 

She doesn’t bother pulling out her bags when she gets out of the car, since none of the buildings are discernibly one thing or another from a distance, and they haven’t done the bunk lottery yet. Wednesday has no intention of moving them more than once.

She stands there for a bit, considering the camp, her choice to spend a month in the sun, the sheer amount of sunscreen she’s going to go through, before a sharp whistle, the kind forced between fingers in mouths, breaks the droning silence. Wednesday turns, searching for the source of the sound, and finds it at the edge of a ramp leading down from the porch of the small building closest to the lakeside.

Wendy is there, dressed in the summer standard of a blood red T-shirt with CRISTAL LAKE written across the front in fake-log letters and jean shorts that started life as pants for someone much larger. She waves Wednesday over, the beads at the ends of her braids glinting in the sun, before turning and wheeling back into the shade of the roof.

“Hi,” she says, when Wednesday finishes tramping her way over to the building and up the set of stairs that have been tacked on to the other end of the ramp, almost as an afterthought. “Welcome to Camp Cristal Lake. We have no alcohol, there’s barely a camp, and the lake is probably out to get us. You ready to get started?” 

Wednesday grins, an expression that Mother loves and Pugsley’s told her never to make in public again. “Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me.”

“Thanks for coming, even after meeting my door,” Wendy says, before backing into the door and holding it open. “I think this year is going to be one of our best.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, "Wednesday returns to camp", with inspiration from every camp movie ever made, the lake from _American Gods_ , archival footage of a seventies summer camp, and a love for the foolish endeavor that is pseudo-adults attempting to corral teenagers.
> 
> I hope you enjoy! May these last few days of the (seemingly) longest year of our lives be full of good food, good people, and good times! Happy Yuletide!


End file.
